Regarding Joe Biden: A 'Border State' of-Mind?

Keeping track of facts when considering 20+ candidates makes this Democratic Presidential Primary season difficult and confusing. The debates on June 25 and 26 added to that confusion.

To date nothing is more confusing and difficult than Joe Biden's attitude towards working with with the late Democratic Senators James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia, both Democrats who were staunch opponents of desegregation.

What's confusing about this is that while speaking at a fund-raiser at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City on June 18 it was Biden who foolishly brought up as a positive bragging point his working with the two segregationist Senators.

When other candidates subsequently raised questions about his bragging point days prior to the first debates, Biden attacked them and refused to apologize. See The New York Times June 19 stories Biden, Recalling ‘Civility’ in Senate, Invokes Two Segregationist Senators and Joe Biden and Democratic Rivals Exchange Attacks Over His Remarks on Segregationists.

In that second Times article it was explained:

    Mr. Biden, who is running for president in part on a message of national unity and reaching out to those with different viewpoints, particularly courted Mr. Eastland, in spite of his racist views and remarks.
    The two men developed an “unlikely relationship,” as Mr. Biden put it in his 2007 book, as Mr. Eastland helped Mr. Biden achieve his first seat of power on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Mr. Biden and Mr. Eastland sharply disagreed on several civil rights-related matters, but they were also convenient allies, as both were vocal opponents of school integration through busing, a controversial topic at the time.

California Senator Kamala Harris raised this bragging by Biden a week later in the June 26 debate putting in the spotlight that portion of Biden's political history he chose to brag about. (And for that, she has been attacked even by a fellow Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard.)

The cultural issue making Biden's bragging problematic can be explained. He was a Senator from Delaware, representing the people, history, and culture of that state. Many do not seem to know that Delaware was a Border State in the Civil War. As indicated on the map above, the Border States were Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri.

For a complete review of related cultural history, you may want to read Slavery in Delaware which notes at the end (emphasis added): "As it turned out, Kentucky and Delaware, among the border states, continued to tolerate slavery, even after Lee's surrender. Delaware's General Assembly refused to ratify the 13th Amendment, calling it an illegal extension of federal powers over the states. Only in December 1865, when the 13th Amendment went into effect on a national scale, did slavery cease in Delaware."

It's interesting to note that the 13th Amendment ending slavery was considered by Delaware's General Assembly as "an illegal extension of federal powers over the states."

That brings us to the 1970's segregation issues in the United States that confronted Biden when he took office as a U.S. Senator in 1973.

What we need to keep in mind is that there is de jure segregation, established and/or supported by explicit law. With regard to schools,  U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren (a former California Governor) wrote in the decision opinion of Brown v. Board of Education (1954): "Segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race deprives children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities, even though the physical facilities and other 'tangible' factors may be equal."

But the subject in the 1970's was de facto racial segregation which was (and continues to be) the result of prejudice, economic stratification, white flight, and other factors short of explicit government discrimination.

Remember that Brown was about schools. As a child in the Berkeley, California, school system in the 1970's, Senator Kamala Harris benefited from a busing program established by the local school system on its own initiative to deal with de facto racial segregation. Around that time, Congress was considering mandatory busing legislation where local schools failed to address the subject.

As noted by The New York Times Senators Biden and Eastland "were also convenient allies, as both were vocal opponents of school integration through busing." In other words, a Senator from a Border State and a Senator from the Deep South shared a view about keeping children racially segregated. It's that simple.

It would be an absolute lie to say that de facto racial segregation of schools was a simple problem. California was also struggling at the time with the fact that segregated neighborhoods created radically unequal school systems compounded by the frequently denied subconscious emotional subtext of racial bigotry.

The California Supreme Court in the early and mid-1970's struggling with reality finally threw its collective hands into the air and in Serrano v. Priest invalidated the entire school financing system based mostly on property taxes noting:

    The amount of revenue which a district can raise in this manner thus depends largely on its tax base -- i.e., the assessed valuation of real property within its borders. Tax bases vary widely throughout the state; in 1969-1970, for example, the assessed valuation per unit of average daily attendance of elementary school children ranged from a low of $103 to a peak of $952,156 -- a ratio of nearly 1 to 10,000. (Legislative Analyst, Public School Finance, Part V, Current Issues in Educational Finance (1971) p. 7.)

The Legislative Analyst noted that at the elementary school level, among school districts the annual per student spending ranged from $407 to $2,586. Among high schools the per student range was $722 to $1,767.

This situation was mostly because rich folks congregated in their communities and poor folks were relegated to poor neighborhoods, with developers, real estate brokers, and mortgage lenders discriminating not only on relative wealth but also on race, to make those neighborhoods "exclusive".

And while the negative impact was not simply racial, minority children were most frequently impacted. In other words, the California Court recognized that extreme wealth differences when incorporated into a government structure was no less government sanctioned segregation than a law.

Committed to the 1865 Delaware belief that any interference in de facto segregation is an illegal extension of law, Biden,  Eastland, and far too many other 1970's Americans were never going to restructure school systems to attempt to correct the problem.

Today otherwise well-meaning folks like Biden would not support busing as a solution. They do offer platitudes and hand-wringing as they have since the Brown decision. And in California, the Legislature and school districts are still struggling, tweaking financing, classroom assignments, and other factors - even attempting charter schools.

It isn't that efforts are not being made many states. We have no good way of overcoming economic segregation. In truth the current worsening of economic inequality will expand that segregation. In the 21st Century, education should have become the great equalizer.

The truth is that all of Trump's base and most of the core of Biden's support do not see this as a problem. And that's pretty close to half the voters nationally.

The reality is that Biden's ignorant, self-important "'Border State' of-Mind" bragging may have already seriously split the Democratic Party. Most importantly, his stumble makes it clear that there may be no way to appeal both to the Rust Belt white voter that elected Trump and to the expanding under-50 ethnic/racial minority population.

Even the appeal "beat Trump" may not work if the Democratic candidate is as fumbling and unenlightened as Trump.

And this discussion doesn't even get into the fact that Biden is keeping his Senate records secret, documents that could enlighten us on his deliberations with regard to the 1982 and 2006 on reauthorizations of the Voting Rights Act, on the 1994 crime bill, on his actions in limiting witnesses in the Thomas hearings, on his support for the Iraq War, on his efforts regarding climate change, and on correspondence and meetings he had with world leaders over decades.